LTX SYSTEMS

Providing actionable tech advice to executives, project managers, and engineers on all things VMware, containers, cloud, and more

Accelerating Enterprise IT with Advanced Technologies

Experience

LTX Systems has experience with some of the largest and most complex deployments of enterprise technologies, including networks of 50,000+ users, thousands of servers, software architecture, enterprise virtualization, cloud service providers, and more. From the tier 1 desktop support level to tier 4+ engineering support, LTX Systems has the proven track record to improve any IT firm.

Innovation

Our approach to problem solving includes out of the box thinking in all situations. We employ rapid prototyping coupled with our extensive experience and cutting edge technologies to assist in process and architecture improvement.

Technology

LTX Systems has expertise in some of the latest and cutting edge technologies from companies like VMware as well as open source solutions like Docker and Kubernetes. We are capable of combining the best components from a wide variety of vendors and filling in the gaps with custom software and solutions to create world-class solutions that meet the most demanding needs.

vRealize Orchestrator (vRO)

vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) is an automation and orchestration tool that sits at the core of the VMware Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC) stack. vRO is responsible for gluing together components and providing extensibility for the stack, and is a valuable tool in the arsenal of any cloud or VMware shop.

Recent vRealize Orchestrator Articles

Workflow packages are exactly what they sound like – a collection of workflows compressed into a package format that can be imported on one or more target servers. Actually, they’re a little more than that: they also contain other components necessary for workflow dependencies such as actions, configuration elements, and resource elements.

vRO comes with a built-in feature for exporting workflow documentation in PDF format. This feature can be used to create pretty verbose amounts of documentation, especially on large workflows. Once generated, the documentation contains information about the version history, inputs, attributes, outputs, workflow steps, the workflow schema, and all the contents of scriptable actions within the workflow.

As I recently worked on a customer request, it was discovered that the vRealize Orchestrator AWS Plugin may have a bug which blocks the ability to describe tags within EC2 and to iterate over the tags and use the information.

This article goes into depth about the problem with the AWS Plugin's EC2DescribeTagsResult class and how to work around it using the BaseAmazonObject.getNativeObject() method.

vRealize Automation (vRA)

Enterprise-class self-service portal combined with highly extensible automation and orchestration. vRA enables automated IT as a Service to free your engineering team up to do more innovating and less day-to-day operations. Take a look at our informative articles to learn more about how to use and implement vRA.

Posted in vRealize Automation

vRA 7.4 is a minor release, but brings some long awaited goodies to the table for vRA users that should help hold users over until the 8.0 release happens sometime in the future.

New features include expanded Solution Exchange content, the ability to deploy OVF templates as part of blueprints, Custom Request forms enabling control over the end-user request experience, and vRealize Orchestrator multi-tenancy leveraging vRA tenant authentication providers.

ServiceNow has become something of a de facto ticketing and IT service management (ITSM) system in large enterprise environments. Many organizations are looking to achieve their self-service ITSM goals by making ServiceNow the single interface for as many functions as possible.

The reasons for this vary per organization, but the end-state goal can usually be broken down into one of the following outcomes: Single Pane of Glass, Enterprise Service and Ticketing System, andTicketing & Approval integration.

Now that a business group has been created with a reservation assigned, and which has been entitled to a blueprint in the catalog, we can test the configuration by verifying the item appears in the catalog for an entitled user, and we can verify the blueprint and reservation work correctly by requesting the item and ensuring it gets provisioned correctly.

Recent Articles On Containers & Cloud

PKS provides the simplest method to deploy production Kubernetes at scale. It layers on top of infrastructure you already have and already know how to run. This makes it infinitely more valuable due to the fact that you can use tools and expertise already at your fingertips. On top of that, it provides a supported commercial release of the open source Kubernetes solution coupled with additional value-add components that solve most of the problem inherent with designing and operationalizing a Kubernetes deployment. On top of all of that, PKS can play nicely with many of the other VMware SDDC stack components to form a full featured solution that other on-premises Kubernetes solutions can’t touch.

VMware Cloud Foundation is the comprehensive Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC) stack that includes the world-class vSphere virtualization platform for compute; VSAN for storage; NSX for networking; and anything higher than the Basic edition also includes vRealize Suite and vRealize Network Insight.

The Latest on VMware NSX

Microsegmentation is the process by which a traditional layer-2 subnet is further subdivided into micro segments through the use of the NSX distributed firewall. This is made possible because the firewall filter layer is built into software modules (VIBs) in the hypervisor kernel which inspect traffic at the ingress and egress of virtual network interfaces on virtual machines within the environment.

NSX comes complete with a REST API that can be easily consumed from command line and scripting tools in addition to full-scale custom coding solutions. This makes it accessible from other VMware technologies, such as vRealize Automation, and vRealize Orchestrator, as well as to PowerShell scripting and shell scripting (via curl, for example). It is also possible to write custom code solutions that integrate NSX configuration modifications via the REST API into consistent workflows that accomplish work on behalf of system administrators and end users for the purposes of automatically, consistently, and securely configuring the network.

NSX can run in a multi-site fashion, with highly available a universal controller cluster (runs at a single site) and an NSX manager running at each location. The NSX manager runs a universal synchronization service that is responsible for replicating changes between sites and making all sites compatible with each other.